NFT: BBI, Tell Me What You Know About Wireless Routers!

With Comcast Blast. (200 up).

Range is awesome. I get strong wifi signal outside on patio and in detached garage. Recommend.

just fine. Both have good chipsets, good (and well maintained) built in firewalls, and enough antennas to ensure that you get good coverage.

They are a bit more expensive than previous gen routers, but the routers are doing a lot more than they had been and at a much faster pace, so they're beefier than what used to go for $10-50 the past few years.

You need a power wire and an internet wire.

That's it.

Well, the first two.

So it looks like I'm in the right ballpark after all.

depending on your home layout, you can link 2 or more together to eliminate any home 'dead' spots

1. Stay away from Linksys. For years I used Linksys and found them to be very reliable. However something has changed, purchased the EA6500, and in less than a year had to dump it because of all the bugs in the software. Even with all the complaints and bad reviews Linksys continued to sell it without correcting the problems

2. Netgear Nighthawk AC1900. Excellent router and performance. Only knock on it, is that I needed a router that allowed me to control when my teenagers devises access the internet, and this router doesn't offer that feature

3. ASUS RT-AC87R. Decent router with a lot of features, and good throughput (handles a lot of traffic). There are issues with the 5GHz wireless that ASUS has been unable to correct. The 2.4GHz works great

4. D-Link AC3200. Kicks ass, has the latest technology and supports the latest internet speeds. Is on the expensive side, and have found that the top end internet speeds I am currently receiving are overkill (even with all the streaming and gaming devises we run in our home)

sold off to Belkin. In the interim, a lot of people instrumental to Linksys' original success had departed, they had gone through waves of cost reduction to make them more appealing as a sale, and by the time they were sold off again they were a shell of the organization they had been originally (happens so frequently in the tech business it's not funny). The Linksys you buy today is a Linksys in name only.

The Google routers and some of the others (Eero, Netgear's Orbi) have user friendly configuration options for mesh networking that will allow you to wirelessly extend your network throughout your home with additional access points, but the cost starts to escalate quickly. The routers mentioned here do support mesh networks through bridging that you can configure in the router's UI, just that they don't have the same user friendly setup element that the Eero/Orbi/Onhub do.

In comment 13362544 Beer Man said:

Quote:

1. Stay away from Linksys. For years I used Linksys and found them to be very reliable. However something has changed, purchased the EA6500, and in less than a year had to dump it because of all the bugs in the software. Even with all the complaints and bad reviews Linksys continued to sell it without correcting the problems 2. Netgear Nighthawk AC1900. Excellent router and performance. Only knock on it, is that I needed a router that allowed me to control when my teenagers devises access the internet, and this router doesn't offer that feature 3. ASUS RT-AC87R. Decent router with a lot of features, and good throughput (handles a lot of traffic). There are issues with the 5GHz wireless that ASUS has been unable to correct. The 2.4GHz works great 4. D-Link AC3200. Kicks ass, has the latest technology and supports the latest internet speeds. Is on the expensive side, and have found that the top end internet speeds I am currently receiving are overkill (even with all the streaming and gaming devises we run in our home)

Thanks for this. Solid info.

In comment 13362564 jcn56 said:

Quote:

sold off to Belkin. In the interim, a lot of people instrumental to Linksys' original success had departed, they had gone through waves of cost reduction to make them more appealing as a sale, and by the time they were sold off again they were a shell of the organization they had been originally (happens so frequently in the tech business it's not funny). The Linksys you buy today is a Linksys in name only. The Google routers and some of the others (Eero, Netgear's Orbi) have user friendly configuration options for mesh networking that will allow you to wirelessly extend your network throughout your home with additional access points, but the cost starts to escalate quickly. The routers mentioned here do support mesh networks through bridging that you can configure in the router's UI, just that they don't have the same user friendly setup element that the Eero/Orbi/Onhub do.

The house I currently own, has cat-5 cable running all over it (something the previous owner did). So I do use my Night Hawk as an access point in my basement.

and have had very few problems. I have read recently, however, about Netgear routers' vulnerability to intruders, and Netgear's seeming refusal to address it, so I'm considering getting a Cujo firewall.

Not to hijack the thread, but does anyone have experience with Cujo? Necessary, or overkill?

In comment 13362653 Section331 said:

Quote:

and have had very few problems. I have read recently, however, about Netgear routers' vulnerability to intruders, and Netgear's seeming refusal to address it, so I'm considering getting a Cujo firewall. Not to hijack the thread, but does anyone have experience with Cujo? Necessary, or overkill?

Not a fan of the Cujo - doesn't do anything particularly well and paying a monthly service fee (and not a cheap one at that) doesn't appeal to me.

Does your ISP provide you with a firewall or is your Netgear router exposed to unfiltered internet traffic? If you disable your router's remote management features and it's behind an ISP router, I wouldn't worry about it.